Bah! Notifications were broken by the latest release of discourse so we never saw this.My apologies, the problem is fixed now. You should have gotten a "summary from your last visit" email today.

I can assure you that the source release does work, but it takes some tweaks on some platforms. You totally forgot to mention what kind of machine you are using to compile. Based on your output I am going to guess it is some sort of BSD machine where 'make' is not GNU make. Using 'gmake' is a requirement as mentioned in the README.

You stumbled into src/libc/string/Makefile.inc which is a leftover and unused file. Install gmake and try again, then include the OS and version if you are still having problems.

Yeah, bk-5.4.6 is only available commercially and as you found it can't be built from that source.

Github is just a clone of the open source bk's source. It is generating incorrect information by suggesting that the 5.4.6 'release' actually works. I can't really fix that without removing the 5.4.6 tag which is useful information.

As Wayne said, what you are trying to do won't work. It took a lot of work to make BK compile without a BK repo around it. Compiling versions earlier than bk-7.0 won't work (and I think 7.0 was problematic, you can look through the source history to see).